Towards Youth:A Play On Radical Hope

As democracies thin out all over the world, is there a radical hope to be found in the humble high school drama classroom? Dr. Kathleen Gallagher has spent her life researching young people and how drama affords a rare window onto their experiences, anxieties and dreams. Written by award-winning documentary theatremaker Andrew Kushnir, Towards Youth brings Kathleen’s timely workto the stage, and reveals startling truths about youth culture in England, Greece, India, Taiwan and Canada. Exploring Brexit to Trump to growing up in times of austerity, this new play envisions drama kids across the globe as more than the canaries in the coalmine. While helping us to understand how they’re shouldering this world they have inherited, can young people teach us all a better way forward?

Originally commissioned through Dr. Kathleen Gallagher's research project: Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Kushnir's plays are "gritty, moving, disturbing, and sometimes funny. The use of language is astounding.” - Times Colonist

Kushnir has done an extraordinary thing in weaving all the material together and presenting the varying experiences of his subjects. Their stories resonate in the telling, and offer a rare and humanizing glimpse into an understandably guarded and mistrustful community. - The Torontoist